This photo taken Aug. 4, 2012 shows the inside of the "tiny" house April Anson built in Portland, Ore. For the past couple of months, 33-year-old Anson and her friends have been planning, measuring, sawing and hammering their way toward completion of what might look like a child’s playhouse. But to Anson, the 19-foot-by-8-foot structure, built on a heavy metal trailer chassis, will be home when she starts a PhD program at the University of Oregon.

For the past couple of months, 33-year-old April Anson and her friends have been planning, measuring, sawing and hammering their way toward completion of her new living quarters, an 19-foot-by-8-foot home. The structure, built on a heavy metal trailer chassis, will be home when she starts a Ph.D. program at the University of Oregon.At far left, the inside of the house.

EUGENE, ore. —Most people who come to the University of Oregon this fall to start a Ph.D. program probably will scramble to find an affordable apartment or a house to rent for the five to seven years it could take to complete the degree.

Not April Anson.

She’s moving down from Portland, and she’s bringing her home — her “tiny house,” to be more accurate — with her.

For the past couple of months, 33-year-old Anson and her friends have been planning, measuring, sawing and hammering their way toward completion of what looks like a child’s playhouse. But to the 1996 Churchill High School graduate, the 19-foot-by-8-foot structure, built on a heavy metal trailer chassis, will be home.

“I’ve always dreamed of, in some way, building my own home,” Anson said. “The idea of having a hand in creating the space you live in really appeals to me.”

That space refers to living quarters of roughly 130 square feet, although that’s considerably larger than the first house she “built.”

“I did have a playhouse when I was a kid,” Anson said. “It was made of cardboard washer and dryer boxes, with washcloths for curtains. It was in my mother’s garage.”

The plans for her grown-up house, on her Facebook page, show a 2½-foot-by-2½-foot porch that opens into a living room 6½ feet by 7½ feet.

Beyond that is a kitchen, on the right, measuring 4 feet by 6 feet next to a bathroom that is 3 feet by 6 feet. Up above, a 6-foot-square loft is large enough to accommodate a queen-size mattress with storage around the edges. “In a structure this small, one benefit is that you can almost survive off the scraps from larger projects,” she said.

The final cost of Anson’s tiny house will be between $8,000 and $9,000. She will park it on a piece of family-owned land, where she can get electrical service until she eventually installs solar panels. So-called gray water from sinks and shower will be filtered, and sewage will be pumped out and taken away for disposal. “My plan is to keep working, to make living in the tiny house as self-contained as possible,” she said.

As she wrote on her blog, Anson plans to live in her tiny house for the duration of her studies at UO — and maybe beyond. “In this way, I hope to live a little smaller, leave a little (less), and learn in what ways formal study can be acted in the every day.”

In a way, nothing could be more appropriate for a person in the literature and the environment program, which examines the relationship between the physical qualities of nature and the way they have been portrayed, valued and manipulated culturally and politically.

The discipline is sometimes referred to as “ecocriticism,” which dates academically in this country to the mid-1990s but sends its roots even deeper, from the poets and writers of the 19th century to the much earlier expressions of nature in the oral histories of native populations.

While all that may sound hifalutin, in the same way, building her own house has given Anson a similar and much deeper appreciation of the intricacies involved in creating a place to live.

Another premise in building her tiny house has been the determination to reuse or recycle as many materials as she can in putting it together. She found her desk sitting on a curb, awaiting the garbage truck. A sink came from an old trailer home belonging to an aunt. Barn wood that would have been discarded otherwise will cover her interior walls.

“I have one friend who’s kind of a dreamer, who always wanted to build a tiny house,” Anson said. “Since I decided that’s what I wanted to do, Jason (Reitz) has been there working on it every step of the way, because he knows a lot about how to do something like this.”

The nice thing about Dutch ovens is that their iron is of one weave, so to speak, with nothing but metal all around, over and above, whatever’s cooking in them. So hot coals on their noggins is a no-never-mind.

The annual hop harvest is just around the corner in Washington state’s Yakima Valley, the agricultural area where 75 percent of America’s hops are grown, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.